June walked into the apartment. Her gaze immediately went to Nick and the sleeping baby curled up on his chest. She walked over and sat on the sofa next to them, one hand covering her mouth for a long moment as she stared at Nichole. "Hi," she breathed at them both, taking her baby's tiny fist gently in one finger.
Nick put a finger on his lips to shush Hannah as she entered the house, full of her usual pep. Hannah nodded silently, then dragged her father into the kitchen to make dinner. It had been a long drive home from Windsor, and she was starving.
"Look what we made," Nick murmured. The same words she had said to him, the first time they had snuck a look at their baby, months before. He studied June's face. A black left eye and a fading purple mark on her jaw that definitely had not been there the day he'd left her at the safe-house. "How'd you get the bruises?"
"It doesn't matter," she whispered back at him. "Nothing matters, I'm here now. Tell me about her."
Nick let his question drop, for now. "She likes literature, like you. Her favorite book is Moo, Baa, La La La. If you read it once to her, you'll have to read it three times. No negotiation. She's very stubborn—no idea where she gets that." He looked at June meaningfully before continuing. "She likes sheep. Might become a shepherd. She's definitely not gonna be an athlete; she's not that good at crawling. And she's probably never going to get good at crawling, and never learn to walk, 'cause I never put her down. Uh, she likes watching the kids at the park; she looks before she speaks."
"Does she speak?" June asked with a smile.
"No, she's the silent type, but she's really very observant. She watches everything going on."
June leaned closer to place her free arm around him. "She gets that from you. The strong silent type. Like an Eye."
"No, not like an Eye," he corrected quickly. "She just…takes everything in." June's thigh was pressing against his, her arm wrapped around his back. They were accustomed to hiding their relationship, communicating only through the brush of a leg or a finger in passing. She never embraced him, not when anyone else was within sight. And this was really not the time to start being demonstrative, not with Luke twenty feet away. Don't stand, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me, Nick sang in his head. "You should, um, we shouldn't, I mean." He tried again. "You're married," he reminded her.
"Yeah, I am." She didn't move.
He gestured at her arm. "You shouldn't…touch me in a way you wouldn't in front of Luke."
At that, she disengaged and moved away from him, slightly. "This is gonna be weird, isn't it?"
"I dunno. Maybe. Luke said I can stay here as long as I want, or need, 'til I get a job and can afford my own place." He looked down at the still-sleeping child on his chest. "I don't want to be away from her."
"Of course not." She shook her head. "We'll…make it work." She took a picture out of her jacket pocket. "I brought you a present from Windsor."
"You had time to get souvenirs?"
June had to laugh at that. "Not exactly. Well, kinda." Since his hands were full of Nichole, she held the paper up so he could see it. A sonogram. "He's sucking his thumb," she said softly.
Nick stared at the grainy black and white image. "Well, he's probably been pretty nervous for the last few days. I mean, I was. I know how he feels." He tore his gaze away from the sonogram to look at June. "It's a boy?" he choked.
She shrugged lightly. "The doctors weren't sure; it's a little early to, uh, see. But I think so." She put her hand on the bump of her belly. "He's lower down than Nichole or Hannah."
"Old wives tale."
"Maybe." She smiled. "But this week, I'm thinking of the baby as a boy." She leaned closer to him again, kissed his cheek. "He's very healthy, that's the important part."
Nick resisted the temptation to kiss her back. Instead he closed his eyes and pressed his lips against the top of Nichole's head. "You want to take her?" he murmured. "Because my right hand is completely numb at this point." He held the baby's head and flipped her over, into June's waiting arms.
"Hi, darling," she cooed. She studied her daughter for a moment, nestling her small head in one elbow, before looking back up him. "Luke says you're a really good daddy."
He considered. "I've never been truly proud of anything I've done in my life except her. And you." He looked straight into June's blue eyes, and his belly clenched as it always did when she was close. She held his gaze, unwaveringly. Abandoning all pretense of restraint, Nick leaned forward and kissed the mouth he had been craving, one hand coming up to stroke the side of her face. She kissed him back at first, then pulled away. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head.
"No, don't be." June averted her eyes, confused by her conflicted feelings. "I love you," she said softly.
"Well, you should stop that."
"Yeah. We're being stupid. You know we're being stupid." She smiled. "You said that to me once."
He remembered. The Waterfords' kitchen, the smell of cinnamon, June in bright handmaid-red in the dim room. "It was true then, and it still is."
"It didn't stop us."
Nick risked a look back at her face. "I guess we're just stupid."
"I'm the stupidest person in my class," Hannah declared at the end of dessert.
The three adults all stopped eating pie, forks hanging in the air, and stared at her.
"No, you're not," her mother protested. "Why do you think that?"
Hannah felt tears coming and blinked them away angrily. "I can't do math. I'm in a class with eight year-olds, and they're way better than me in math. And reading. And spelling. I really paid attention in school in Gilead, really well, but I didn't learn any of the things that Canadian kids know. I'm only good at P.E. and music…and I would be okay at needlepoint and sewing, but they don't even have those classes here."
"I thought you liked the school here," Luke said. He exchanged a helpless look with June. They had explained Hannah's unusual situation to the school counselor, who had suggested putting the would-be sixth grader back in third grade, since she hadn't mastered most basic academics. Maybe that had been a mistake; maybe home schooling would have been better. But they had wanted her to be around kids. Normal Canadian kids, who said "you betcha" instead of "praise be."
Hannah swallowed the lump in her throat. "I like the school, daddy, and the kids try to be nice to me, and Ms. Applebaum is really sweet, but I just feel…dumb. Everything would be easier if I could read better. I like watching the science experiments but then when the teacher starts writing stuff down, I can't keep up, and I can't read the social studies book, so when they start discussing it, I'm lost."
As Nick and June offered soothing words of support, Luke got up to retrieve the poster he'd bought that afternoon. He placed it in front of Hannah. "So here's a way to practice reading about fruits. It's a chart, see? This column shows how many weeks pregnant a woman is, and here you see the fruit that's the same size as the baby. This week, mommy's thirteen weeks pregnant, so what fruit is that?" He pointed.
Hannah concentrated. Five letters. "The CH together are pronounced like chair," she began. The E and A were clear, but she wasn't so sure about the first letter. "Something…ee-ay-ch?"
"The first letter is a P," Luke prompted. "Like penguin. And the A is silent, so you don't pronounce it here."
"Peach!" Hannah said triumphantly. "The baby is a peach?" She stared at June's belly, trying to imagine a peach inside.
Her daddy gave her a high-five, which meant he was pleased. She had learned that on the playground at school. "Exactly. So let's tape the chart to the fridge, and every week you can let us know how your little brother is doing. And you'll learn all your fruit vocabulary. Good plan?"
Hannah nodded and consulted the chart now taped on the refrigerator. "Last week, he was a ploom." She looked at her mom. "What's a ploom?"
June cocked her head. "Sometimes a U is pronounced like 'uh.' You know, English is one of the world's hardest languages to sp—"
"Plum!" Hannah smiled. "But I like peaches better. Can we name the baby Peach?"
Nick nodded seriously. "Peach Osbourne. Sounds good."
"Veto." June scrunched her eyebrows as she smiled. "And it's bath time for the baby. Hannah, can you please choose Nichole's pajama and an outfit for tomorrow?"
"That's my job." Hannah trotted after her mother, her frustration with schoolwork temporarily forgotten.
Once June was gone, Nick stood up to clear the table. Luke began loading the dishwasher. For a minute, the two men worked in friendly silence, comforted by the banal ritual of doing dishes. Norah Jones crooned from the speaker on the counter.
"That chart, that was nice of you," Nick began.
Luke looked down. "I'm trying. It's…a little hard for me to get excited about this baby."
"I know that."
"I'm trying," Luke repeated, and then lapsed back into silence. The water ran as they rinsed dishes.
"Well," Nick finally said, "she's in the second trimester now. That's the fun part." Luke smiled at that, and Nick winked at him. "Hormones aplenty."
Luke had to laugh at that. "Oh yeah, I remember that. She was pretty…frisky...when she was pregnant with Hannah."
"Yup. Lucky you." His courage buoyed by that moment of humor, Nick decided to push the issue that had been bothering him. "Listen, on a more serious note, you can't just come up behind June and grab her like that."
Luke threw him a look. "I didn't 'grab' her. I was just…smooching."
"She doesn't like it."
Luke finished loading, closed the dishwasher, and turned to give Nick his full attention. "Yes, she does. Don't tell me what my wife likes. She's always—"
"She used to like it, maybe. Not anymore. It scares her. She jumped when you kissed her, didn't you notice that?"
Luke sighed. "Well, that's the difference between you and me, right? You see her as a trauma victim, always jumping at shadows, always needing you to save her. And I see her as a smart, confident woman. She doesn't need to be handled with kid gloves, and she doesn't need saving."
Nick stared down the older man for a long moment, debating whether to share things June had told him in confidence. He's her husband, he should know. It's still affecting her. He spoke quietly. "After you two were separated at the border, she was taken to the Red Center for training, brainwashing, whatever, to become a handmaid. And then she got her first posting, this old commander who had been some kind of sleazy real estate tycoon before. A real dick. Whenever she was in a room alone with him, even for a minute, he'd grab her ass or stick his hand up her dress. Always whispering stuff at her and breathing in her ear. After almost a year of that, the guy stroked out and died. By the time she moved to the Waterfords, she was walking around like a zombie, always jumping when somebody came into the room. It took her a week to say anything more than 'yes, Mrs. Waterford' or 'no, Mrs. Waterford.' So yeah, maybe June used to like it when you came up behind her and kissed her—five or ten years ago—but she doesn't anymore. So stop fucking doing it."
There was silence in the kitchen for a time. Hannah giggled in her room. Luke stared at the floor.
"You didn't know her then. When she was at that first commander's house."
"No."
"So she told you about him." Luke looked up at Nick, anguished. "Why didn't she tell me that?"
Nick shrugged. "She doesn't think you can handle it. She wants you to think of her the way she used to be." He gestured towards the living room. "Like she was in those pictures. All smiles."
"That's not how I think of her."
"Sure it is." Nick smiled tightly. "You think of her as a hot 23 year-old, fresh out of college, with a rocking new job as an editor and a hipster wardrobe, ready to take on the world."
Luke considered that. You look invincible, he'd told her the day they'd met. It was true, June was brimming with youthful confidence and optimism. They'd tumbled headlong into an affair, carelessly, not really caring what it had done to his wife. They'd been equally thoughtless about getting pregnant—Hannah wasn't planned. They hadn't even been married yet when she was conceived. But the June that Nick was describing, the slave girl who regularly got groped and fingered…and worse…by some repellent maggot, that wasn't the woman he knew. And yet that was June. The current version.
"You're right," Luke said abruptly.
Nick's expression softened. "Look, she's your wife. She loves you, you love her, you waited for her for five years. I respect that, and I won't get between you guys. And after two weeks living here with you, I consider you a friend, and I want your marriage to last. But I'm telling you, Luke, that girl you met at a hot dog stand in Boston? That girl's gone. You need to stop being in love with her ghost and start seeing the woman in front of you, or else you're gonna lose her." As he turned to go to his room—the guest room—Nick added, "Because I do see her, the way she is now. And if she leaves you, I'll be right there waiting."